Hi -- has any kind of trustable fix happened yet to the flash player upgrade? It's been causing a lot of trouble and the help tips seem to have been just wastes of time? Is Adobe back in the game? I am on Windows 7 64 bit with IE 11 somehow snuck onto it. I upgraded my flash player a few times in the past week, but it doesn't work after it's installed, and now the upgrade procedure doesn't work properly anymore so I can't go through the upgrade any more. I've read that this is what's happening for lots of people. Any good news out there about this mess?

The problem ISN'T with Flash Player. It's with IE11. Yahoo, Facebook, BBC, CBC, ESPN, NFL and NBA websites have all reported problems with IE11 specifically. The sites don't recognize the browser and therefore can't recognize the plugins in the browser. It's all in the code of IE11.

I have machines with XP, Vista, 7, 8 and 8.1 and they ALL run 11.9.900.170 with IE, Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera. IE11 is the only one that causes problems, on Win 7, 8 and 8.1. The other browser work fine in ALL OS builds.

I designs websites as a freelancer, and I use IE for testing only. For everyday use, it's a "train wreck" to say the least. It doesn't parse CSS properly, and everything I build has to be "tweaked" to make it work. Javascripts can be problematic with IE too, but the recognition thing is just the latest sign that Microsoft did no "real world" testing of it before they unleashed it on the Windows world. So far, their only response to the millions of complaints, which started as soon as it was released October 18... is this: "Use Compatibility View for affected sites". To date, there is no indication that they intend to actually fix their code, so million of pages won't see IE11 as an "unknown browser".

Windows 98 (1st Edition), Windows ME, XP (Service Pack 1), IE7, VIsta, Windows 8... ALL have been abominable. That gives Microsoft about a .500 batting record when it comes to major new products over the last fifteen years. That's why I use Firefox on a Mac. While not everyone can afford to switch to Mac, Firefox is free, as are Chrome, Safari and Opera. Chrome isn't very popular because it's bundled with other things, and it's a resource hog, but there's nothing apart from pure stubbornness keeping people, who aren't locked down at work, from dumping Internet Exploder in favor of something that works all the time.